Ghost Writer
I had just moved back to New York City and was staying with my parents temporarily while waiting for my own apartment to be ready. I was also desperately looking for a job. Eventually I had the luck of meeting a very unusual woman who was looking for a ghost writer.
A SEVEN-PART SERIES, BASED ON A TRUE STORY
Originally published March 2022 on nicolejeffords.com
Part I: Ghost Writer
Image: Michael Discenza
Image: Mikhail Nilov
The events in this story took place in the early Eighties, but easily could have happened today. At the time, I had just moved back to Manhattan, city of my birth, after four long, difficult years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’d been an MFA student at Boston University. I was staying at my parents’ apartment on the Upper East Side while waiting to move into my own place a few blocks away on Third Avenue. My six-year-old daughter, Jofka, and I were crammed in the guest bedroom. She had just entered first grade at Rudolf Steiner, a nearby private school. I was looking for a job.
But hey, what kind of job could you get as a writer? I was well-educated, but not well-connected. I’d published poems and short stories in small press, but no one had ever heard of me. My most recent job as a technical writer for a commodities firm had been a bust – I would definitely have preferred selling handbags or cosmetics at Saks to repeating the experience. But I needed a job, and hoped I could find one in my own field. After I’d pounded the pavement a few weeks, my father told me he’d heard of a woman who was looking for a writer to help collaborate on a novel. Her name was Lauren Shapiro (pronounced with a long I, Shup-eye-row), and if I showed up at her apartment at eleven the following Tuesday, she’d be happy to meet with me.
She lived midtown, my least favorite neighborhood, in a luxurious but drably decorated apartment. When I pressed the buzzer, the door opened to a thin blond woman with an extremely intelligent face. She was in her early forties, dressed in a plush sweatsuit. She looked as if she’d just blown out her hair, and from the first moment she was talking, talking, talking … What name did I prefer, Nicky or Nicole? What was I reading? What had I had for breakfast? Where did I live exactly? Did I have children?
The questions were endless but friendly and I quickly discovered I enjoyed conversation with her. She acted like an older sister, concerned about me and my life, constantly giving advice, querying decisions, checking my hair, my clothes, the look on my face.
She was as direct and determined as a can opener prying open a lid, digging for information that I’d happily offer up. But after several weeks of these very pleasant meetings, we still had no idea what story we wanted to tell. Lauren didn’t seem to be in a hurry, and many mornings passed with us chit chatting and gossiping and having a good time. The only problem was I needed a job, and this one didn’t pay.
Part II: Ghost Writer
Image: Brando Makes Branding
Image: Aaron Lares
I found a paying job with a small PR firm. Actually, it was a part time job, three mornings a week, writing public service announcements and making phone calls to local radio stations. “Small” is an understatement. The firm consisted of one woman, whose name was Hilary Kleinfelder, and whose office was located midtown, in a single tiny room overlooking Fifth Avenue. I liked Hilary in an arm's length sort of way; she was smart, pleasant, even gracious, but she was also overbearing, constantly checking and rechecking my work, mouthing the words I was to say during phone calls, and keeping too stern an eye on me as I wrote copy at the desk across from hers. All in all, it was an uncomfortable job, and I much preferred my mornings with Lauren Shapiro, trying to tease out ideas for a best-selling novel as she sat on the couch and brushed the tangles out of her long blond hair.
Truthfully, I cannot at this point remember the ideas we came up with or what the presumptive novel was about. I’m sure there was a murder in it. Probably also a duplicitous affair, an infidelity, a seedy relationship, a jealous attack. All I know is that our mornings together followed a curious routine. I would arrive, we’d have coffee and talk at length about what we’d done the evening before, what movies we’d seen, who we’d been with, what we’d watched on TV. Lauren would disappear a few times to the bathroom, but that didn’t seem strange. At some point she’d go into the kitchen and emerge with a full tumbler of scotch, which she’d deposit on the end table beside me, without my having asked for it. The first time this happened, a week or two after I’d started working with her, I was a little shocked – who offered, or drank, that amount of liquor that early in the day? But I was also secretly gratified: this was a woman who understood something about me that no one else did.
I was a drunk. I’d gone to great lengths to hide my problem over the years, but the fact was I’d drink till I passed out every single night of my twenties and early thirties.
Somehow Lauren figured that out. After providing me with liquor, she’d vanish into the kitchen again, this time to emerge with half a hunk of iceberg lettuce and a jar of mustard. While I sipped at my scotch, she’d dunk shards of lettuce into the Grey Poupon, consuming every morsel with rabbity teeth until all the lettuce was gone. Then she’d go back to the kitchen for the other half of the iceberg. Neither of us discussed this odd behavior, and it was quite a while before I understood what was going on.
Part III: Ghost Writer
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Image: Shannon Vandenheuvel
Eventually, Lauren Shapiro, my writing partner, explained her strange routine of mid-morning lettuce-eating and the dispensation of booze. She was bulimic. She’d eat a big meal and then vomit it up. Because of her eating disorder, she kept practically no food in the house, just salad fixings, almonds, coffee, booze. If she faltered and bought a gallon of ice cream, she’d eat the whole carton in a sitting and then put her fingers down her throat. For the same reason, not wanting to gain a single ounce of weight, she’d take thirty or more laxatives a night to purge her system. The following day, needing to be near a toilet, she couldn’t leave her house till one or two in the afternoon.
Somehow, even though my lips were sealed and I never said a word, she was able to figure out that I was an alcoholic. Perhaps, because she had an area of vulnerability in her own physiological makeup, she was able to sense one in mine. Certainly, she was extremely intuitive about people and what made them tick. “We might as well hang out with our two addictions,” she told me, chomping on a handful of nuts. “We’ll work better that way.”
Which certainly wasn’t true. I didn’t hold my liquor well (all it took was a few sips for me to start slurring) and I never dared drink till nighttime.
But Lauren would thrust a glass of scotch at me no matter what, and there we’d sit, she with her nuts or lettuce, me with my booze, two addled, creative women trying to come up with story ideas while our brains were fried on food, liquor, laxatives, emesis.
At some point we came up with a story, although I don’t remember what it was, probably something murky and thrillerish. I started writing, and Lauren would read the pages every week and encourage me to keep going. I remember delivering scenes to her at her hairdressers where she thumbed through the work as she sat under the dryer, her mouth a thin, unreadable line. I had to write for my PR job as well, and I’d spend hours in that tiny office, slaving over annual reports and sneakily working on the manuscript I was creating together with Lauren when the boss wasn’t around. Our thought was that we’d produce a bestseller (I was pretty good at page turners), that there’d be money and success. In the meanwhile, it was Lauren’s job to keep me happy and the way she did that was to set me up with various guys she met in her travels (she regularly commuted to be with her husband who lived in DC). One of the guys, a man named Harry Rosen who had a Brooklyn accent and sounded old on the phone, kept calling and calling till I finally agreed to go out with him. I was still living at my parents' apartment at the time.
Part IV: Ghost Writer
Image: Tim Mossholder
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I was in my parents’ guest bedroom, where Jofka and I were staying until our own apartment was ready, when Harry Rosen arrived to take me out to dinner one Friday night. She, my little six-year-old, got the first glimpse of him, and came running to the back yelling, “Mom, he’s really ugly!”
He wasn’t ugly, just short, balding, baggy-faced, old. He was in a business suit. When he arrived, my father asked him what he’d like to drink, and he said, “Anything that isn’t nailed down,” a phrase that became famous in our family. I gave him a quick look and thought, “We’ll go to the nearest restaurant and get this over with fast.” The man was definitely not my type.
But in the restaurant, something happened. We both ordered stiff drinks (scotch on the rocks). I planned to drink mine slowly to make it last, but before I’d even finished, Harry ordered another round. This was a man after my own heart!
He kept the drinks coming, and I began to grow warm and comfortable, especially once I realized he had no romantic interest in me. Quite the opposite: he told me he sensed I had a crush on someone (I did, a very fleeting one, a brief encounter that went nowhere) and I should feel free to discuss all angles and developments with him. By the time we left the restaurant, I was really drunk and not too sure what was happening. Everything was blurry. We were in a cab, but I had no idea where we were headed. Eventually we stopped in front of what I later learned was a club. Harry led me inside and deposited me at the bar while he went around saying hello to people he knew. The place was vast and cavernous, and I felt lost and a little helpless until I started talking to the woman seated next to me. She was very pretty with smooth skin, a gorgeous, meticulously made-up face, a beautiful decollete. “Where did you get your sweater?” I asked, admiring the soft, pink cashmere.
“Bloomingdales,” she said in a deep, male voice.
Unable to stop myself, I gasped and said, “Oh my god, you’re a man!”
“You didn’t know?” she said, gratified that I’d fallen for her female identity.
“No idea,” I said. I looked around nervously and spotted Harry in the arms of an extremely tall, robust woman. My new friend’s eyes followed mine. “Is that a man, too?” I asked.
My new friend, whom I later learned was a well-known drag queen named Chrysis, studied my face carefully. “Let me put it to you this way,” she said. “You are probably the only true female in here.” And she suggested I accompany her to the ladies’ room in order for her to prove her point.
Part V: Ghost Writer
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Image: Greta Hoffman
My gorgeous new red-headed friend led me to the bathroom, which was jammed with women of all shapes and sizes, most of them on the larger side. “You do realize,” she whispered to me, “that you’re the only woman with a real vagina in this place.” I looked around. The line of women waiting to get into the stalls boasted a lot of big hair, big boobs, big jewelry, big swanky dresses. Deep voices called back and forth to one another. There certainly was a festive atmosphere compared to most public ladies’ rooms I’d been in over the years. What I learned was the guys taped their penises down as flat as they could under their panties to avoid a telltale bulge. And talked openly about it, complaining of pulled pubic hair, rashes, ingrowns, discomfort that was clearly worth it in the end. Aside from the visuals and the talk of flattened penises, I could have been in any number of fancy restaurant or hotel bathrooms in the city. The place smelled heavily of perfume, talcum powder, breath mints, cologne, hand lotion, and was aggressively female in the way it presented itself. And yet I, the one true female, felt out of place, fraudulent.
Chrysis hugged me goodbye that night, and told me she’d see me around, which I doubted she ever would. I went back to my regular life of ghostwriting, struggling over annual reports, caring as best I could for my six-year-old daughter, drinking myself into a stupor every night.
If I didn’t have liquor in the house, I’d go to a bar around the corner, leaving Jofka alone in the apartment and getting so horribly blitzed that I had trouble finding my way home. Some mornings I’d wake up on the floor next to the toilet.
I went out with Harry Rosen a few times during this period. He’d call, saying, “Put on your limousine shoes, we’re going to a fancy club,” and he’d send a car for me so I wouldn’t have to worry about high heels and painful feet. He was an incredibly kind man. He’d made a fortune in the import/export business, had had four marriages and I don’t know how many children, and lived in an enormous penthouse apartment in the village. One night I attended a party there, and once again I think I was the only female present. Harry had a fascination with transsexuals, drag queens, people whose gender and sexuality were a little blurry. Liquor flowed abundantly and all around the apartment guests were snorting lines through hundred dollar bills. I snorted coke, too, and the rest of the party disintegrated into a fog of murmuring voices, tall bosomy bodies, loud laughter. I probably made a drunken fool of myself, but have no memory of the event other than a crush of ambiguously gendered males sipping cocktails and bending over lines of coke. About a month after that event, I got sober.
Part VI: Ghost Writer
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Image: Suzy Hazelwood
How did I get sober? Well, I couldn’t write anymore, which, for me, was the kiss of death. I’d sit down to work and no words would come out. I was totally blocked, my brain frozen and inaccessible. I’d spend hours in front of the typewriter and … nothing but inner voices telling me what a fool I was. I wanted to be sober, I was ready, so achingly ready, to be rid of the monkey on my back. But I didn’t know how to get myself on that path until a writer friend, who was also an alcoholic, came to stay with me over Columbus Day weekend and we spent the entire time talking about our addiction. After that, I never drank again. For some reason just talking at length to another drunk about the disease of alcoholism did the trick. I spent two weeks doing my best to avoid liquor, and then threw in the towel and went to an AA meeting because I knew I couldn’t stay sober on my own.
About a week after I’d started AA, Harry Rosen called to ask me out to dinner. I told him I couldn’t accept because I’d given up alcohol and had begun to attend meetings. “You have?” he exclaimed. “Me too!”
And so we had a sober dinner, which was okay – we had a lot to talk about, but without booze there was a certain deadness to the conversation. The following weekend he asked me to go to the movies with him and Chrysis, who, coincidentally, had also stopped drinking. We saw Far from the Madding Crowd and then repaired to a coffee shop. Harry was having a hard time managing his life without alcohol. “I need a drink,” he complained in a desperate, whiny voice, and Chrysis responded with an encouraging: “Now Harry, have some ice cream.”
“I don’t want ice cream!” he cried.
“Well then,” said Chrysis, “Let’s go to an AA meeting.”
The nearest meeting was in the Bowery (this was in 1981, when the Bowery was still a sketchy dump filled with drunks and vagrants). Thankfully, Harry agreed to come with us and we went out into the street, looking, in shape and size, like Goldilocks and the three bears: I was the smallest, Harry was medium, and Chrysis was tall as a tree. We linked arms and walked a few blocks until we came to the dark doorway of a small church. A few people stood in the street outside, smoking cigarettes and talking. From inside the building, we heard a loud, plaintive voice yelling words we couldn’t decipher. With our arms still linked, we entered the church and found our way into a room filled with down-and-out-looking people, most of them there for the cookies and coffee.
Part VII: Ghost Writer
Image: Liza Summer
What was important to me in the early days of sobriety was consistency, going to the same meetings every day so that they became habitual, a crucial part of my schedule. I was two weeks sober when I slipped into the dim church basement in the Bowery with Chrysis and Harry. I was used to orderly meetings, where a designated person told their story for twenty minutes or so, and then people raised their hands and spoke from the floor. But the meeting in the Bowery was different. When we entered the room an argument was in process. The speaker, a rough-looking woman in her forties, was yelling – hurling insults – at another woman seated in one of the rows of auditorium chairs in front of her. They were screaming at one another. The three of us sat down gingerly. This was more like theater than an AA meeting, and we didn’t know what to make of it or how to behave. We were prepared to be entertained, but in the orthodoxy of AA this shit show was shocking.
I had been sitting there for a few minutes when a scruffy-looking man in faded jeans walked in carrying the Sunday Times. He was about my age, thin and scrawny with wire-rim glasses and shaggy hair. I wondered briefly if he was a down-and-out Bowery bum, here for the coffee and cookies, but then, perhaps a little stupidly, decided a bum wouldn’t be carrying the Sunday Times. The next morning I saw this same man at an upscale meeting near my house on East Seventy-ninth Street. He was dressed more neatly and somehow we left the meeting together and he walked me home, talking about this and that in a deep baritone voice that immediately crept into my heart. We have been talking together ever since, and that was forty years ago.
In a way I could say this was the story I ghost wrote, rather than the grand, titillating, bestseller I had tried to create with Lauren. But there was an element of destiny to it.
Two years before, on a sweltering day in August, I was walking down a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when it occurred to me that thoughts were like radio waves and I could radio ahead to my soul mate, whoever he might be. I focused my mind to arrow sharpness. Whoever you are, I messaged, I’m going to start walking to you, so why don’t you start walking to me.
I had the odd feeling those words were traveling to someone very specific, someone I could actually sense out there in the universe. A moment later, I had an answer. A voice in my head (but was it really?) said: Two years, Brooklyn.
Perhaps it was because of that that I decided to move back to New York. Two years later, I walked into an AA meeting in the Bowery and there he was, my soulmate in wire rim glasses and faded jeans who happened to live in Brooklyn.
